


someone opened me up while I was sleeping (and filled me up with sand)

by blubark



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: AU, Gen, Hallucinations, Post 3x06, Suicide Attempt, appearances from the team, dark so take care guys, mind control ish themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 14:43:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5094530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blubark/pseuds/blubark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It came at her in the sandstorm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	someone opened me up while I was sleeping (and filled me up with sand)

She dreams of being chased, being hunted, dreams that have her flinching awake.

It came at her in the sandstorm.

She doesn’t dream of Will.

…

If anyone asked her to explain – and they won’t, because of all the questions it’s the least obvious – she’d say that there’s sand in her brain. Itching and scratching away, getting in the road of her synapses and threatening to suffocate her, to bury her.

It’s so much harder to think, being back. Harder to function. She attributes some of it to the lack of Will, to the guilt. Some to the increasing feeling she’s getting that none of this is real, that she’s died or gone mad or something.

She attributes most of it to the sand, the black sand, clawing its way through her brain and mouth. It’s whispering, but nothing she can hear. It’s howling, whipped into a frenzy, tearing at her skin.

It’s trauma, logically. Stress and shock and fear. Logically.

But that’s nothing she can prove.

…

‘Memories have a funny way of changing on you when you’re not looking.’

Jemma looks away. Tries to deflect. Nothing is changing, nothing, but Garner is skipping away from the statement like it didn’t mean a thing. She doesn’t have to explain how she didn’t have Will. How she did. How alone and how surrounded she felt. Her mouth tastes like sand.

Doctor Garner looks concerned, as always. It doesn’t feel real, though. She wonders if she could make him shout at her, do something unexpected. So far, it’s all been expected. Like a movie. Like a joke.

Like what she dreamt would happen, except with more noise and light and less relief.

…

They’ve been working in silence, the star map stretched between them. She doesn’t think they’ll find anything this way, but Fitz is right – it’s worth looking, at least. Will would tease her for looking at more stars. She can’t imagine it, but she knows he would.

Fitz clears his throat, and she startles out of the tangles of empty daydreams.

‘Why didn’t you mention him?’ Fitz’s face is tense, lips thin. He wears the cost of the question all over his body. ‘Before now?’ She expected him to bring this up like it didn’t matter, not like he was sick with wondering.

Jemma pauses. ‘I thought you’d be mad.’ It doesn’t sound like an answer. Did she think that? Everything feels too bright all at once.

‘Two – two heads are better than one,’ Fitz says. ‘If you love him -’ He breaks off.

She frowns, turns her face away. She’s itchy. ‘Thanks,’ she says. It doesn’t _feel_ like an answer. The silence drags between them, tugging at her. She waits like a masochist as Fitz straightens his shoulders, pulls his courage together.

‘If – I just don’t understand,’ he says. ‘How you could _not_ say something.’

She doesn’t know how to say _neither do I_ so she settles for, ‘I thought you’d be mad.’

Fitz shuts his eyes, grimaces. ‘OK.’

…

‘I don’t understand,’ she says. ‘You don’t make sense.’

She doesn’t know who she’s talking to, but it feels nice to say.

…

Jemma scratches the back of her neck, reading the report on the composition of the Monolith. Certain elements keep jumping out of her with vague twinges of familiarity, despite their alien nature. It’s comforting, solid, and peaceful. So she jumps when Bobbi appears in her field of view, standing next to Jemma’s desk with a grim face.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Bobbi says, wincing as she tries to put too much weight on her bad leg. She leans on the desk.

Jemma sighs, rubbing at her neck as the sand clogging her brain threatens to come to the fore. ‘I thought you’d all be mad.’ She pushes the report and a fragment of the Monolith away from Bobbi, just for something to do.

‘No.’ Bobbi folds her arms, leaning down a little to try and look in Jemma’s eyes. ‘That’s bullshit.’

Jemma swallows, tries to ignore the way everything is getting just a bit fuzzier.

‘I did,’ she says. Her tongue feels heavy in her mouth, and everything comes out bitter. ‘You were all so worried, and I was off falling in love. How was Fitz meant to feel?’ She smiles, she shrugs. There are shadows in the corners of her vision.

Bobbi tilts her head. ‘Oh, so it was all peachy, then?’

Jemma laughs.

And she keeps laughing, until Bobbi steps forwards and wraps her in a hug. It’s awkward, as Bobbi can’t kneel and Jemma feels incapable of standing, so she presses her face into Bobbi’s stomach and breathes.

…

It came at her as an astronaut and how had she believed that but it’s reaching for her and it’s so familiar -

…

She wakes up with Skye – Daisy – clutching her shoulders, and flinches away as the dark halo of her hair reminds her of it, reminds her of dust and–

‘What’s going on?’ Jemma says, startled to hear her ruined voice. Her throat hurts.

Daisy sits back, face slack. ‘You were screaming.’

‘Oh.’ Jemma manages an uncomfortable smile. ‘That’s new.’

Daisy’s eyes narrow. ‘You kept saying "leave me alone".’

Jemma twists her fingers together in her lap, fighting to keep herself grounded.

‘This Will guy…’

Jemma shakes her head. ‘I wasn’t screaming at him. I don’t – I wouldn’t scream at him.’ She’s lying, she can feel it in her stomach, but why would she be lying. It must be guilt. She’s never been good with feelings.

Daisy nods, once. Her hand clutches at Jemma’s sheets, scrunching them tight in her fist.

‘He was nice,’ Jemma says. ‘You’ll like him.’ She can’t remember why she thinks that.

‘Tell me about him.’

Jemma smiles. She makes stuff up, but she’s telling the truth. Probably.

It’s hard, she reasons, to feel OK with everything. It’s just the weirdness of being lost and found and everything in between. Memory is a fickle thing and with emotional turmoil, well.

She’s definitely telling the truth.

…

It comes at her out of the sandstorm –

…

At least the stone is real.

…

Jemma hits the bag, once, twice, more. It feels nice, the shock of pain. Her knuckles are bleeding, but not as much as they would be if she were hitting stone walls, if she were frothing mad on an alien planet somewhere. She likes knowing this.

‘Simmons!’

Jemma stops, gasping for air. ‘May,’ she says, smiling. ‘Sorry, am I in your way?’

May looks like she hasn’t slept, which Jemma can understand. They’ve both lost people. A frantic edge of panic spikes through Jemma’s throat – Will isn’t lost.

‘No,’ May says. ‘But you are bleeding all over my equipment.’

‘Oh.’ Jemma glances down at her knuckles. ‘Sorry. I’ll clean up.’

May grabs Jemma’s wrist as she walks over to the towels. ‘Are you alright?’ The dark circles under May’s eyes add to the intensity of her gaze, her voice.

‘I need someone to punch me,’ Jemma says. She blinks, trying to work out why she would say that, why that of all things would spill out.

May’s brow twitches. ‘Sorry?’

‘I told him, Will, I told him, if you need to check if somebody is real, ask them to hit you.’ She breathes out, long and hard, relieved. That felt true. The relief she feels about being able to say something real almost outweighs the fear of honesty that’s somehow wrapped around her throat.

May nods. ‘That’s normal, for someone who’s been through what you have.’

Jemma scratches at her neck. ‘Yes.’

May seems to be studying her, dark eyes roaming her face, scanning her knuckles. ‘We can spar, when you're ready. Don’t tear your hands up again.’

‘Thank you.’

…

The breakthrough comes after two days of no sleep, of staring at the properties until –

‘I don’t know, it just feels right,’ Jemma says. She doesn't say, like remembering.

Fitz nods, looking over the calculations. ‘I’m coming with you,’ he says, firm. He coughs. ‘If, uh, that’s – I just don’t want you going alone.’

Jemma smiles. ‘Thanks.’

It’s been six weeks, but she’d know if Will had died. She’d know.

…

In the end, she has to fight to keep everybody else on Earth. It makes her angry, that they don’t trust her, that they think she can’t handle it.

‘If it closes,’ she snaps, ‘I’m not sharing my food with all of you.’

Hunter laughs, trickling off when nobody else does.

Coulson nods. ‘Just be careful.’

‘Of course,’ Fitz says. He cinches his backpack higher on his back.

Jemma wants to tell him to stay, that they will have more safety if there’s someone on the other side who knows how to remake a portal, but she knows he wouldn’t take it well.

They step through together.

…

The whispering is louder, here, but she’s excited. She feels alive, like she hasn’t for months, for years maybe.

She’s done something right. She forgets Will for a moment, forgets Fitz, lets the strange low words tangle in her brain, and breathes.

‘Simmons?’ Fitz touches her, and her concentration is broken. The whispering stops, and she feels a strange pressure in her head.

‘This way,’ she says.

…

‘Will!’ She drops the last couple of rungs, looking up for Fitz. Silence meets her. ‘Will?’

She tears aside the fragile curtain. Dust billows down, causing her to cough, blinding her.

He’s sitting in his chair, head on his shoulder. Dead.

Long dead.

His face is sunken and shrivelled, eyes gone. His clothes – those are Will’s clothes, his gun in his lap. His brains on the wall beside him. _I have one bullet_.

She staggers, catching herself on the table, knee knocking against a chair. Fitz steps through after her, gasping at the corpse. It would probably be funny, any other time. Maybe.

‘Jemma,’ Fitz says. ‘Simmons!’

She doesn’t look at him, can’t look away from Will. ‘This isn’t right,’ she says. ‘It’s tricking me.’

‘Jemma – ‘

‘This isn’t right!’ She kicks out at the chair, and it crashes against the wall. Will’s empty eye sockets stare at her actions.

‘He’s been dead longer than – ‘

Jemma crouches down, trying to control her breathing. ‘This isn’t right,’ she says. ‘This isn’t right. It’s not him.’ She’s aware of her hands trembling. Her head hurts. ‘It’s – I must have been infected, it wants me to die, it wants me to go mad.’

‘Jemma, we need to go.’ Fitz sounds scared, but Jemma can’t bring herself to care.

‘We need to find him!’ She pushes her fingers into her temples, trying to stop the thoughts racing there. ‘This isn’t him.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Somebody else! I don’t know!’ She can hear whispering again, laughing. Can taste the vinegar wine. ‘I don’t know.’ There’s no sandstorm, no howling winds. Just a room filled with a corpse, so It can’t be here. But it’s someone else, one of the scientists, maybe. Anyone else.

‘Jemma, you said that Will told you… it made them go mad. It eats life.’

‘Yes.’

Fitz’s voice is very quiet. ‘So why would it stay here, on a dead planet?’

It feels like her brain is bleeding, her vision shaking with her heartbeats. She looks up at Will, and his face twists in front of her, to the alive one she remembers. The alive one she imagined.

‘I – no.’

‘We created a portal it can get back through, an open portal,’ Fitz’s words are faster now, but she can barely hear him. She wonders if this is what brainwashing would have felt like – wonders if the twisting of the world and her memories would have been preferable earlier, if she should have stopped running at HYDRA.

It came at her in the sandstorm, and –

‘I didn’t make it up,’ she says. ‘I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t.’ She looks around. Her bed sits, alone, in the middle, where they’d pushed them together, where she remembers him holding her hand.

‘We need to go.’ Fitz tugs at her shoulder.

No – where she’d cried alone, where she’d – _stop talking to yourself Jemma_.

‘I can’t have.’ Nothing makes sense. ‘Fitz.’

He’s grabbing at her hands, pulling her with him. And she remembers _No I’m not going with you_ and arms around her waist, and in her eyes and ears and no the sand wasn’t in that memory and.

‘Fitz,’ she says again. She lets him drag her along, despite the way her body feels about three sizes too big, tripping her up. None of this is real, none of it, she’s dreamt it all and she’s ruined it all.

It came at her in the sandstorm, and she felt its hands around her neck.

‘I’m here.’

‘You’re not, nobody’s here.’ He’s pushing at her but it feels like wind, a storm staggering her. She’s wandering in circles in a desert, hallucinating love.

‘Jemma, please.’ He’s placed her hands on the ladder, and she climbs up. Collapses at the top with the stars swimming above her, the wind gentle on her skin.

‘I made it up,’ she tells them. It’s nice to admit the truth. Her mind is cracking open, the sand is scouring through her like an hourglass, pouring away the time. Everything on this planet is laughing at her.

She crawls over to a small outcrop of rocks, grabbing one. Jagged and heavy. She brings it down on her wrist. The pain feels far away.

‘Jemma!’ Fitz screams and grabs at her hand as she brings it up for another downward swing. She thought he might have just disappeared on the ladder. Why should her hallucinations make sense, now that she’s figured them out?

‘No! I’m not staying here, I’m not staying here, let me go!’

Fitz ends up on top of her, pressing her down into the dirt with his body. ‘We’re leaving, we’re going home, Jemma. Please. We have to close the portal before it gets through.’

‘Just let me go,’ Jemma says. Her head is pounding, her limbs feel disconnected. She wants to go before more of Will leaves her head. Before Fitz is ruined. Before she remembers why it wants her.

Fitz ends up dragging her back, as the overwhelming confusion and panic gave way to sobs.

It’s already through.

…

It came for her in the sandstorm, and she took it home.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't hate Will. I just really need him to lead to more than a love triangle. I also wanted to make Jemma's PTSD arc make more sense in light of what we now know. Which led to, hey, why not alien mind control (suggestion?).
> 
> I think I wrote this too quickly.
> 
> Title from 'They'll Clap When You're Gone' by Chelsea Wolfe. Because it fit and I'm not subtle.


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